KATHMANDU, NEPAL – On a recent Saturday, Sunil Babu Pant walks from temple to temple, touring around 50 temples from 8 a.m. to noon in the Thamel area of Kathmandu. As he enters each temple, his eyes begin to search for Ajima. Unlike other gods, the Newari deity Ajima is not represented by an image, but is shown as a hole in the wall or floor, signifying the womb or vagina of the goddess. The deity is guarded by a skeleton on one side and a figure having male and female genitalia on the other.
“Thousands of years ago, there were six different gender identities,” says Pant, 51, Nepal’s most prominent advocate for sexual minority rights. In search of Ajima, Pant wanders through hundreds of temples in Kathmandu. What he seeks, he says, is a society that once again values pluralism.
In 2008, Pant became Asia’s first openly gay federal lawmaker. In response to a petition he filed demanding the recognition of same-sex marriage, the Supreme Court of Nepal issued an interim order in 2023 directing the government to register same-sex marriages and, in the meantime, maintain a record of said marriages until a final verdict was reached. By the end of that year, Nepal had registered two same-sex marriages.
Same-sex marriage is one of the many legal battles Pant has fought and won for the Nepali community. Simran Sherchan, program coordinator at the Federation of Sexual and Gender Minorities of Nepal, says Pant came to light at a time when the words “sexual” and “gender minority” could not be openly discussed in Nepal. As a result of their persistent struggle, Nepal today is considered a country with progressive laws regarding sexual and gender minorities. Thanks to Pant’s work, Sherchan says, “today we (sexual minorities) can openly defend ourselves.”
In 2007, Pant won a case that forced the government to ensure complete and fundamental equality for all sexual and gender minority groups, and to recognize the “third gender.” In 2011, Nepal became the first country in the world to recognize a “third gender” on its census forms. And in 2012, citizenship regulations were amended, based on Pant’s court order, to grant citizenship to people of sexual and gender minorities by including “others” in the gender field of the citizenship certificate.
Pant’s story begins in a village in the mountainous district of Gorkha, where he was born and studied. She later moved to Kathmandu and, in 1991, received a scholarship to study computer science in Belarus. During his five years there, he witnessed the arrest of sexual and gender minorities and realized that people like him were stigmatized by society. It wasn’t until 1997 in Japan that he got his first taste of sexual freedom after arriving in the country on an internship; Japan offered a culture much more open to all sexualities, he says.
After gaining confidence about his identity in Japan, Pant, who had enrolled in 1998 to pursue a degree in philosophy in Hong Kong, decided to return to Nepal to help the community back home. In Kathmandu, in search of people like him, he went to Ratnapark, a public park in the heart of Kathmandu, around which sex workers looked for clients. All of this was clandestine because prostitution was (and still is) illegal in Nepal. It was there that he met another gay Nepali man.
Pant continued visiting Ratnapark and meeting more people, discovering the poor state of sexual health among them. Around 2000, the Nepalese government started a program on HIV/AIDS. Since there was no study on sexual and gender minorities in Nepal at the time, the government widely included MSM (men who have sex with men) as a risk group in the early 2000s, says Sushil Khatri, president of Sparsh Nepal, an organization working in the field of HIV/AIDS in the country.
In 2003, with the help of a friend in New York, Pant launched a sexual health awareness program for sexual and gender minorities. He toured Nepal distributing condoms and lubricants, something that earned him the nickname Kandam Bahadur in the community (Kandam is the Nepali pronunciation of “condom” and Bahadur is a common middle name of Nepalis meaning “brave”).
The community trusted him because he revealed his identity at a time when doing so could get him arrested or sent to a psychiatrist. “When they went for treatment, even for a common seasonal illness, they were sent to a psychiatrist. “They were afraid to go to the hospital because of this mentality,” Sherchan says.
To combat such discrimination, Pant met with more than 600 members of the sexual and gender minority community in Kathmandu and in 2001 founded the Blue Diamond Society, a non-governmental organization created to work on sexual health and rights. Within a year, it had 8,000 members. However, the police repeatedly arrested many of those who work with Pant for “disturbing the social balance,” Pant says.
An important aspect of Nepal’s LGBT movement was that it came of age during a civil war. In fact, Pant and his friends raised slogans during the monarchy abolitionist movement in Nepal in 2006. Pant says political candidates from all parties encouraged him to participate in the movement and said they would work with him for minority rights. sexual. But they turned their backs on him when they came to power, he says.
It was a different time in Nepal. “Two decades ago, there were no policies or regulations regarding sexual and gender minorities” and people were afraid to go to the police, says Dinesh Raj Mainali, spokesperson for the Kathmandu Valley Police Office. “Today, Nepal has the most progressive law in South Asia.”
And things keep changing. Rukshana Kapali, director of Queer Youth Group, acknowledges that Pant has worked for sexual minorities, but says society is changing and so is the community, and Pant has no idea what or how the new generation thinks. Queer Youth Group is a youth-led network working on sexual orientation, gender identity and sexual rights in Nepal.
Pant is aware that not everyone agrees with him. His own relatives gossip about him, she says, but he continues with his work. Because of his perseverance, Pant was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014.
His personal life changed drastically after losing his partner in 2017. Unable to come to terms with this loss, he traveled to Sri Lanka to become a Buddhist monk. He wanted to leave worldly love behind and Buddhism seemed like a good option. “It is written in Buddhism that to be a Buddha you must be born in a male body, and those who are born as a sexual and gender minority do so as a result of their evil actions.” That, Pant says, doesn’t sit well with him.
As long as society has a patriarchal mentality, he says, his fight will continue. “Once equality for sexual and gender minorities and other people is established, this fight will end on its own.”